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Leon Kass is a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. He is the author of several books, including, Toward A More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs; The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature; Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics; and The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis.Trained as a physician and biologist, Kass has taught on humanistic subjects for most of his career. He has also taken periodic government positions, most recently as chair of the President's Council on Bioethics.
Kass's positions are unapologetically conservative. He views newfangled biomedical processes with extreme suspicion and dread; life-extending technologies are, in his eyes, often dangerous, for they discourage careful thought and deliberate, valuable action. Kass strongly opposes stem cell research and has even had negative words for in vitro fertilization.
Kass refers to his personal distaste for these processes as the wisdom of repugnance, a catch-all phrase that permits him (say his critics) to condemn whatever he dislikes without giving any publicly comprehensible reasons. His primary intellectual opponent in this regard is Martha Nussbaum.
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